ByWater Institute Faculty Fellowships support interdisciplinary collaboration in work that addresses environmental problems—including those at the intersection of environment, society, and community—and that transcends traditional academic disciplines. These one-year fellowships are awarded on a rolling basis. The RFP can be found here.

2020-2021

Keith Clay
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Dr. Clay and colleagues from the departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and River-Coastal Science and Engineering will study the coastal restoration potential of canal backfilling.  They will collect data on hydrology, water quality, soils, and vegetation prior to backfilling and then again post-backfilling to evaluate outcomes of this approach.

2019-2020

Kailash N. Pandey
Physiology

Cardiovascular disease is a major health problem in the South Louisiana/Gulf-Coast area and is the leading cause of mortality and morbidity in our society.  Dr. Pandey, along with co-investigator Vijay John, will utilize genetically modified mouse models to provide new insights to study cardiovascular inflammation, end-organ injury, and dysfunction.

Jordan Karubian
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Dr. Karubian, with co-investigators Laura McKinney, Nehen Raheem, and Barbara Piperata, seeks to develop an interdisciplinary, globally relevant framework for understanding water dynamics in developing tropical landscapes.Their interdisciplinary approach evaluates the social, economic, environmental, and cultural factors that influence water management practices; how these in turn impact water quality and quantity; and what feedbacks exist between management, environment, and human well-being.

Eric Dumontiel and Claudia Herrera
Public Health

Dumontiel and Herrera, with co-investigators Caz Taylor, Dalhene Fusco, Mac Hyman, and Margarita Echeverri, will examine the diversity of the parasite that causes Chagas disease circulating in insect vectors and mammalian hosts, including humans, in our region. This will allow us to model the relative risk of human infection.

2018-2019

Katherine Theall
Public Health

Theall's project with co-investigators Casius Pealer and Sarah Gray will collect pilot data for a grant application that expands on a community-based study aimed at neighborhood blight reduction for youth and family violence prevention in New Orleans communities. Findings will provide novel information on the role of built environment changes for violence prevention and health promotion.

2017-2018

Kevin Gotham and Richard Campanella
Sociology and Architecture

Gotham and Campanella will create a grant proposal to be submitted to the National Science Foundation. The proposed 2-year project will focus on the determinants of business owner support for coastal resilience measures. The project aims to understand how local business owners perceive environmental risk and how they make decisions regarding hurricane and flooding threats.

Claudia Herrera
Public Health and Tropical Medicine

Claudia Herrera and her colleagues from the departments of Mathematics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Tropical Medicine will use the fellowship award for a pilot study that will result in a proposal to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Herrera and her team’s work will focus on Chagas disease, a major public health concern in the U.S. and much of Central and South America.

2015-2016

*Note that these fellowships were awarded under a pilot version of the fellowship program. 

Jordan Karubian
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Dr.Karubain works at the interface of ecology, behavior, evolution, and conservation biology. Dr. Karubian’s Fellowship research project on brown pelicans seeks to (1) provide detailed data on temporal and spatial variation in the degree of chronic exposure to petroleum hydrocarbons, and, (2) assess links between exposure and individual and population-level performance metrics.

Yaozhong Liu
Global Biostatistics And Data Science

Dr. Liu’s main research interests are genetic/genomic epidemiological study for human diseases, including obesity, osteoporosis and periodontitis. In this fellowship project, Dr. Liu will use a proteomics approach to follow up the findings from his recent RNA sequencing study of airway epithelial cells.

Samendra Sherchan
Global Environmental Health Sciences

Dr. Sherchan’s research program addresses critical issues at the intersection of water quality, human health and environmental protection. The goal of Dr. Sherchan’s fellowship project is to understand the incidence of Naegleria fowleri in premise plumbing of low-income homes in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana to inform public policy.

Laura McKinney
Sociology

Laura McKinney’s research focuses on ecology and society and employs an interdisciplinary approach to nature—society relations to examine global and local sustainability. Her fellowship project uses an interdisciplinary approach to advance a theoretical and empirical basis for analyzing global environmental sustainability.

Jason Nesbitt
Anthropology

Jason Nesbitt (Ph.D., 2012, Yale University) specializes in the archaeology of the central Andes. Jason Nesbitt co-directs the “Chavín Hinterlands Project”, which is studying settlement patterns and land-use in the rural hinterlands of Chavín de Huántar (ca. 1100-500 BC), one of the earliest urban centers in highland Peru.